'Pacific Rim' Jumbo-Size TV Spot Is at the Edge of Our Hope

What with the city-demolishing monsters and anime-style robots, the human cast hasn't had much chance to command the marketing for Pacific Rim.

A new extended TV spot changes that by giving Idris Elba some room to be Idris Elba between world-shaking action snippets.

For two consecutive summers, The Wire alum and Luther star Elba has been an MVP in blockbusters like Thor and Prometheus.

Here, he plays Stacker Pentecost, a role that Tom Cruise was interested in for a time. Stacker's a former Jaeger pilot who has ascended the ranks to become the brass of the Jaeger program. As the Kaiju threat grows even bigger and the apocalypse looks nigh, Pentecost must rally the troops and, in his own words, "cancel the apocalypse."

This two-minute TV spot is very much like a proper trailer, and is probably the single best bit of Pacific Rim salesmanship we've seen yet, conveying a big pulpy humanity amidst all the Jaeger and Kaiju battles. In creating his love letter to monsters movies and anime, Guillermo del Toro has relentlessly gone big, so it only makes sense that thirty-second spots have proven insufficient in comparison to this huge commercial.

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Between the sound of Jaeger pilots breathing in anticipation, Pentecost's big speech, and visuals of truly massive creations pummeling each other with a real sense of weight and drama, I am unashamed to admit that this gave me chills. Chills, people.

Just yesterday, we saw a pretty spectacular and fun IMAX midnight poster, and you can check that out by clicking here.

June's not even over yet, and the number of loud, destruction-heavy action sequences has already proven surprising, with Man of Steel alone accounting for a whole summer's worth of collateral damage. Will months of starships crashing into San Francisco and exploding Washington D.C. landmarks hurt Pacific Rim, a movie that contains a bunch of Godzilla-like monsters wrecking human population centers?

Who knows, but the director of Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone, and the Hellboy movies made a movie about robots fighting monsters. So get in line.

Pacific Rim hits theaters on July 12th.

Here's the official synopsis:

When legions of monstrous creatures, known as Kaiju, started rising from
the sea, a war began that would take millions of lives and consume
humanity’s resources for years on end. To combat the giant Kaiju, a
special type of weapon was devised: massive robots, called Jaegers,
which are controlled simultaneously by two pilots whose minds are locked
in a neural bridge. But even the Jaegers are proving nearly
defenseless in the face of the relentless Kaiju. On the verge of
defeat, the forces defending mankind have no choice but to turn to two
unlikely heroes—a washed up former pilot (Charlie Hunnam) and an
untested trainee (Rinko Kikuchi)—who are teamed to drive a legendary but
seemingly obsolete Jaeger from the past. Together, they stand as
mankind’s last hope against the mounting apocalypse.